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Playerunknown's Battlegrounds now has its own PUBG Corp company, has sold 13m copies

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds now has its own PUBG Corp company, has sold 13m copies

Early Access Battle Royale darling Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds now has its own company.

Developer and publisher Bluehole has announced the formation of PUBG Corp, with the title’s executive producer Chang Han Kim taking on the role of CEO. while Maui Games and Neowiz vet Wonghee Cho will serve as COO.

Bluehole is based in Seoul, South Korea, but has opened up PUBG Corp offices in America and has plans for new ventures in Europe and Japan.

Oh, and Bluehole quietly announced that Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has now sold 13m units. At the start of September, the title had shifted 10m copies, meaning that the game has settled into a groove of selling roughly one million units each week. Not bad for an unfinished PC-exclusive title.

“Given Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds global success, we want to ensure that we have the operational efficiency that is required to support the game globally,” Kim said.

“This new structure allows us to be nimble as we look towards the expansion of strategic business opportunities that include the game’s potential in the eSports sector and the growth of PUBG as a true global IP franchise.”

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is without a doubt the success story of 2017, now boasting the highest peak-concurrent player figure on Steam.

Creative director Brendan Greene says he can see the game selling 100m units, which seems like a reasonable goal and one that the title might hit – at its current trajectory – at the start of 2019.

It hasn't all been good news, however, with Bluehole publicly firing shots at Epic Games over its battle royale mode in Fortnite. The firm faced criticism for this, before clarifying that its issue wasn't the battle royale mode itself, rather that it was using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 tech while it was making PUBG


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.